apr 2022 round up
May. 2nd, 2022 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mistydream💿 listening
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not sure if the stats are accurate bc i kept having to reconnect my last.fm to spotify :< i can see how gingamingayo ended up being my most played track this month, but i swear i didn’t play glitch mode this many times…
- this month i caught delayed hai cheng disease. i love how minghao this whole song feels, and i feel about him and this song in the same way i feel about key and bad love - it’s clear that it’s something he’d been conceptualising for a long time, and seeing it come to fruition meant a lot to him ;; there’s also something nice about watching minghao express himself, both linguistically (because he’s so much more comfortable with putting his thoughts into words in korean now) and artistically (be it through painting, dance or music). he comes across as someone with a very distinct worldview, and i want to listen to whatever he puts out.
- also not to be one of those [idol name here] brought me here but… [redacted] really did lead me to charli xcx’s crash (well, him and the nyt popcast ep on charli’s career). as a Dance Pop Enjoyer™ i loved the singles (good ones, used to know me), but i also (surprisingly? unsurprisingly?) loved the songs where she was at her brattiest (baby, yuck). i’ll probably backtrack through her discography in the next few months.
- not pictured, but I also finished the iheartradio podcast on tajinyo this month. i realise all my favourite podcasts have a similar structure - on the one hand centred on personal narratives with first-person accounts that draw you into the story; on the other hand covering broader trends (e.g. credentialism, music history in korea) to help contextualise these events. it also left me feeling weirdly guilty about loving fever’s end as much as i do. tablo rightfully criticises the suffering artist trope, but at the same time, i still want to be able to enjoy and celebrate work created through pain. that’s not the same as saying artists must suffer in order to create art. rather, everyone experiences pain in their life to various degrees, but not everyone can transform those struggles into something creative, let alone something beautiful.
📼 watching
i want to say dimension 20 is my hyperfixation of the month, but i sure hope it isn’t because i’m splitting a dropout.tv annual subscription 🤡god knows i love a good high school au, and fantasy high was just that - stupid teenagers trying to save the world while worrying about stupid teenager things like ~looking cool~ and ~getting a girlfriend~. the PCs could have felt tropey, but instead it felt more like these characters were homages to these john hughes tropes. perhaps it’s because the cast was putting at least a little bit of themselves into these characters, whether intentionally or otherwise. i’ll probably start on the seven or misfits and magic next.
i’ve also come to appreciate DnD as a form of collective storytelling. basically it’s 6-7 people improvising based on dice rolls, which doesn’t sound all that exciting until someone rolls a nat 20 to keep the entire party alive. having seen some of the behind the scenes content with brennan lee mulligan, i can only conclude that DMs are some kind of Benevolent Higher Beings who do days of planning only to have to make shit up as they go along during actual sessions because PCs decide to fuck shit up. i’m gonna make sure to be extra nice to my DM the next time i see them <3
📚 reading
hit my reading goal for the year eight months ahead of schedule!! the moral of the story is: reject stretch targets, embrace bare minimum goals.- how it feels to float reminded me of akmu’s nakka for some reason. maybe it’s the theme of falling (or floating, i suppose) to what seems like the absolute bottom. for a heartbreaking exploration of grief, reading this book weirdly gave me comfort. somehow reading about dark thoughts makes me feel less alone? perhaps it helps me see struggles from a third-person perspective.
- between after the inquiry and the singpowrimo post on seeking square brackets approval to “bless the office”, i just consumed writing designed to give me psychic damage this month lol. i hated the prose in this, which i guess is by design - teck, the narrator, is insufferable and also a fucking hypocrite. he accuses everyone else (the ~general public~, intellectuals he dislikes) of connecting dots to form lines where there are none, yet at the very end he literally looks truth in the face and then looks away. despite claiming to be interested in facts and reasoning, his motivations throughout the investigation are premised on two ideas that conflict with other - the system has no faults, and any evidence of fault should be erased. beyond what he did in the final act, teck is ultimately dishonest because he’s unwilling to admit his own ambitions. genuinely wanted to throw up every time he demurred about being ~perfectly content with where he was~. i have more thoughts about the book but also i think, like nithya at the end, i know better than to fight a losing battle. or maybe it’s that, unlike her, i’ve let my edges be sanded down. not sure if possible for it to be both these things at once?